Lewis hyde trickster makes this world

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Monkey puzzles

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art

by Lewis Hyde

432pp, Canongate, £16.99

Near the end of this intriguing book, Lewis Hyde tells a story about one of the artists who epitomise for him the true nature of "the trickster" in the modern world. "A friend once heard Allen Ginsberg lecture on prophecy; at the end of the talk a young male asked, 'Mr Ginsberg, how does one become a prophet?' Ginsberg replied, 'Tell your secrets.'" Secrets are what Hyde tells; not his personal secrets but the secrets of the techniques human beings create and employ to make it possible for them to live together in societies.

His own technique is to burrow for many years through amazing hoards of tales and myths and songs and poems, writings and records, novels and academic works in many languages and of all ages. Then he pieces together and reveals the deeply hidden thematic structures that underlie universal culture. His books give you a powerful meaning of arrival. "Ah," you undergo , "everything really does fit together." You experience a hugely enjoyable sense of Hyde as indeed a kind of a prophet or, at least,

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

Trickster Makes This Planet brings to life the playful and disruptive side of the human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls subverting defence systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating and stealing, tricksters are a amazing bother to have around but paradoxically they are also indispensable heroes.In this fascinating book, Lewis Hyde explores the old myths that state that the trickster made the world as it actually is. He argues that our world, with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt, was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished.

Trickster Makes this World (1998) is a semi-famous book about twentieth-century art, 90 percent of which focuses on the worldwide myth of the Trickster. The manual has been extravagantly praised, but not by anthropologists or folklorists; it is artists and writers who love it. I am enough of a folklorist and anthropologist to understand why it might bother academic researchers – and, I imagine, storytellers rooted in Native traditions – but taken for what it is, it is quite wonderful.

I can remember first encountering traditional trickster tales and being both confused and disgusted. In some traditions, stories of characters like Raven, Coyote, and Rabbit are the most holy lore, told only in winter, in complete darkness. Some of them concern first things: creation, the separation of earth from heaven, the inception of death. And yet, they are bizarre, ridiculous, disgusting, and immoral. In various stories Coyote plucks out his eyes and sends them for a saunter, eats his way out from under a mountain of shit, burns his own anus when he mistakes it for a monster's mouth, lies, steals, cheats, disobeys direct orders from the high gods, and violates every taboo. Coyote is a c

Trickster Makes This World Quotes

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Trickster Makes This World Quotes Showing 1-12 of 12

“The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“There is the family of our birth and then there is a more noble world to which we really belong; the richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“There is no way to suppress change…not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living which allows constant, if gradual alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop skills (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Mak